The beginning of the 21st century shall always be remembered as the moment humanity became really sophisticated at killing poor people who live in mud houses from far far away.
...poor people with incredibly wealthy friends who fund their misdeeds. So yeah, relatively speaking they (the foot soldiers) may be poor but those controlling all sides are not.
And I'd say the 90's was the beginning of the "cruise missile" guided bomb era of warfare.
Realistically, I think that will be a footnote to the explosion of computers and the Internet - and not because the "winner writes history"(which is rapidly becoming moot as time goes on) but because in the grand scheme of things it's nearly inconsequential compared to developments in doing the exact opposite of killing. Your notion also ignores the fact that the reason this exists in the first place is partially the desire to eliminate collateral damage, not perpetuate more of it.
> Realistically, I think that will be a footnote to the explosion of computers and the Internet.
> Your notion also ignores the fact that the reason this exists in the first place is partially the desire to eliminate collateral damage, not perpetuate more of it.
Well we'll see, human lives do seem like they're not worth much, especially those in the 3rd world, out of sight out of mind like another poster said. I mean you could probably kill a lot more of those people with the world standing idly by as long as you have some kind of justification, they can be invaded, bombed, displaced, held indefinitely and tortured with impunity, but now they are trying really hard to only kill as many of them as they really want to, are they not merciful ...
But what is the end goal here, what do they hope to accomplish, when will the killing end?
I think that the US government is in somewhat of a pickle, the war on terror is now being fought for more than a decade, has cost trillions of dollars and thousands of soldiers lives, and for what? There's no end in sight, no easy way out, heck we may be even worse off than before, we have an Al Qaeda offshoot building a state of their own as we speak. You can't just pull out completely and cut your losses because this might come back to haunt us all. The only thing they seem to be able to come up with right now is to further streamline killing to prolong the status quo as long as possible, and even that doesn't seem to be going well.
How the hell are we going to resolve this?
Or maybe I'm just crazy and this will all just blow over after a couple more years of targeted killings, all those islamists may just give up and go home to live peaceful lives, who knows.
